Apparently someone called Lord Kelvin wrote a script called "RedBotton" to search ff.net for stories violating its TOS and report them. Lord Kelvin is part of the Literate Union Forum on ff.net and uses its memberbase to test his program.

I am not sure about this and if I should view him as a genius or as an asshole.
- Probably both.

Some excerpts from his faq:

From a site complaining about it:
The RedBotton Issue and what it means for FFNet:

 

I can't see why they complain about it, unless they aren't actually just stories that violate the ToS. It sucks that some DLP stories would be in that list, but I think I'd rather just read the few good stories on DLP and actually be able to find good shit on FFnet.

Anyways, what are the chances that the bad stories will all be deleted anyway?

 

I think Sesc has already summed up my opinion on the matter with his own post.

Christ, has the stupidity level of the human species suddenly jumped forward 10 points or something over the last month or two? First George Lucas, and now this?

 

Wow, someone trying to exercise authority he doesn't have. I am so shocked.

But in all seriousness, this guy/girl/whatever/ should just let people read whatever they want to read on FF.net and stop trying to be a major asshat.

Its not like anyone is forcing people to read stories they dont want to read. If they don't want to read words like cock or pussy, all they need to do is click the little red X or the Back Button and it will never darken their doorstep again.


Its all about the personal responsibility factor.


What he's trying to do is take away your choice of whether you want to read such things or not.

Seems like a facistic asshole to me.

 

After reading that guy's profile and his forum posts, to me he seems to be a complete and utter arrogant asshole.

...

You know, I'd laugh if the admins on fanfiction.net banned him from using a third party bit of software on their site.

 

..what the fuck?

I know that some of the older stories - especially written pre-2000 were done in script format. And this little douche is going to clear house? He better not touch my fucking The 10th Hakkeshu or whatever it's called.

 

I disagree with this thing on principle, but perhaps it won't be so bad.

I don't think this is about removing stories with the word "cock" in them. It seems more like an attempt at deleting those stories like My Immortal, where English is reduced to "omgz draco ws so hot so i was liek yea we shuld totally hang out".

If that's the case, I like this. If thise robbot thing will start pointing out stories that are M rated - and for good reason - then this is just another of those fag moves ff.net tends to make.

Though I suppose if worse comes to pass, we always have patronuscharm.net. Revan must've put a lot of work into that site, and it's rarely used (I speak for myself and the low volume of reviews I've seen there). This robbot thing could be all the incentive we need to get our shit together, upload our fics and use that site.

Hopefully those stories that don't belong to DLP's active authors and are any good won't be removed by the fagbot, since those we can't exactly copy paste and upload...

 

Would it be possible to get a hold of the code for this bot?

Perhaps a little tweaking and we might make something useful out of it . . .

 

Like reporting every slash story on ff.net fifty times over?

 

They could avoid so much personal frustration with FF if they would allow tags to stories so people can avoid certain crap. If some people are annoyed by substandard english a nice warning tag could help here.
I'm definitely annoyed to waste time skipping over 95% slash to find a potential interesting story. I would even think some quality measurement based on some interest groups with the help of tags would make it such a better experience to every flavor out there.

 

And yet another fantastically stupid idea from a fantastically stupid individual.

Wonder how long it'll take him to come across this thread - someone with that large of an ego could not possibly resist compulsively Googling his own name on an hourly basis.

 

I support it for the most part, quality control would be nice. But the 'terms of use' are totally fucking retarded. It will turn out like when the admins started deleting anything above M.

 

Fuck that. I don't really read fanfiction any more and I'm still angry bout that.

New DLP project, mass report all his stories.

 

Meh I do read some, for instance I still wait for updates on Shezza's stuff and some other stories. But the routine of reading a chapter, waiting a few weeks for an update, reading the next one and so on has lost its appeal. So I mostly wait for stories to finish before reading them nowadays, which means I don't really read that much since most never finish

 

Not to mention that this bot of his violates the terms of service: